November 2010
2 posts
When I was little and I thought my parents were being unfair, I would make lists of things I would never do to my kids. Now, in med school, I make lists of things I won’t do or say to my patients and staff, and ways I won’t treat them.
I have been doing this for 5 months, with surgeons and doctors who were arrogant as hell. The guy I’m working with tonight takes the jackass...
“Do not resuscitate if…
Resuscitation would be futile because the patient...”
– Emergency Medicine Roadmap
September 2010
2 posts
“Patient takes an herbal iron supplement… She, thus, also requires the...”
– Pharm.D
Greetings, friends, from the exciting world of Internal Medicine! That’s right - to the best of my knowledge, I have survived my surgery rotation, and all of its responsibilities, privileges, and awesomeness.
I have to admit that I liked surgery a lot more than I thought I would. The hours are intense, to be certain, but I got to do some truly amazing things, things I never thought I would...
August 2010
1 post
I keep a list.
It’s a list of people I’ve cared about, people I’ve taken care of, people I’ve loved. Some of the people on the list are people I’ve watched grow up. Some of them are people who watched me grow up.
Besides being on my list, the only thing that they all have in common is that they’ve passed on from this world. They’re taking their next...
July 2010
3 posts
Dear AMA,
Please do not try to sell things to me by telling me how expensive they are in terms of lattes. I don’t drink coffee. I drink water and chew wintermint gum. I wouldn’t need any of these things if I hadn’t been getting up at 4AM. I don’t mind being there early, really. I just don’t want you trying to sell me things that others consume so that they can manage...
Your best weapon on surgery- a big smile and a plate of cookies for your nurses. Yeah, that’s right - I went there!
In the hospital, remember this one thing: in almost every situation, no matter how bad your day has been, the patient in the bed is having a far worse day than you.
Your attending might yell at you, you might not do well when being pumped, you might resent being up at work at 5 am.
But you woke your patient up at 5 am too, in a strange bed in a strange place so that you could poke and listen...
June 2010
2 posts
“Congratulations on your tapeworm.”
– V.B.
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder
Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder is a condition of abnormal, exaggerated startle reflex in response to a sudden sensory input. The example provided by George Miller Beard, the first physician to study and characterize the disorder, as that if one was “abruptly asked to strike another, he would do so without hesitation, even if it was his mother and he had an ax in his hand.” (1) It...
May 2010
5 posts
Hypophyseal relationships?
V.B.: How come there's no auto-fill in for when I google "the pituitary is whose bitch"
V.B.: I expected to see "hypothalamus."
Medical Students' Disease
Much of medical education is an art, but just as frequently, it is an exercise in pattern recognition. A woman of child-bearing age who presents with abdominal pain must be given a pregnancy test - while the team might suspect an appendectomy, ectopic pregnancy must be ruled out. Hypoparathyroidism presents with “bones, stones, groans, and psychological overtones.” Ask any medical...
“The clinical definition of fibromyalgia is how you feel when you’re...”
– Attending
Exploding Heads: When Truth and Fiction are...
In 1994, Weekly World News - a tabloid - published a story about a chess master whose head exploded in the middle of the game. Naturally, the explosion was fatal - “experts” diagnosed him with a condition named Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis, in which the body’s electrical system becomes overloaded. The article references a physician, who states that highly intelligent people are at risk and that if...
A short list of things never to Google right after...
Ascariasis: a parasitic roundworm that infects as much as a quarter of the world’s population. The eggs are eaten, they hatch, and the larvae burrow through the intestine, into the blood supply and migrate to the lungs and respiratory tract, where they are then swallowed back into the intestine. They can cause all kinds of problems, most notably, a fatal bowel obstruction. Awesome.
...